Adelaide Mandeville is an interdisciplinary scholar whose site of inquiry is the atmosphere, with a focus on conflicting American ideas about the sky, climate, and weather. Grounded in archival research, her work combines historical and cultural studies with theoretical frameworks from the environmental humanities, science and technology studies (STS), political theory, and religious studies. Her current book project, Changes in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of Weather Control in the Twentieth-Century United States, investigates American efforts to control the weather—from booster development projects in the Southwest to top-secret climate warfare in Vietnam—and the many debates and controversies that those efforts provoked. Her next major project, Enclosed Worlds, will explore twentieth- and twenty-first-century ideas about artificially enclosed atmospheres as environmentally, politically, and socially desirable, and what the insidious stakes of these technoscientific utopias have been. Overall, this research will advance critical, interdisciplinary studies on the politics of nature and the ethics of technology in the twentieth century, and today.

Adelaide’s work has been supported by the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, NASA, the History of Science Society, the LBJ Library, the American Institute of Physics, the Charles Warren Center for American History, and the Mahindra Humanities Center. She has an article forthcoming in Environmental History (July 2025), as well as several works-in-progress. In addition to her own research and writing, Adelaide served as the pedagogy writer and editor for Jill Lepore’s textbook, These Truths: A History of the United States (W. W. Norton, 2023). Adelaide completed her PhD in American Studies at Harvard University in 2025. She holds a BA in Religious Studies from Brown University, where she graduated with honors in 2012.